Howard attacks gang of 43

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Prime Minister John Howard and Coalition MPs have set out to discredit the 43 former senior diplomats and military chiefs who accused his Government of dishonesty over the Iraq war.

Mr Howard told Parliament that 42 of them had retired before the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and he suggested they were therefore not qualified to make their statement.

Nationals MP De-Anne Kelly described the 43 as "doddering daiquiri diplomats from a past era" and asked if they would have acted differently now. She said the world had changed since September 11.

Mr Howard produced comments made by one of the 43 high ranking signatories, former Defence Force chief General Peter Gration, in an article published by the Australian National University in 2002, that: "I think we can accept that Iraq has numbers of weapons of mass destruction and has programs to develop them further."

General Gration said the Government could not brush the statement aside by saying old guys' opinions didn't count.

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And former RAAF chief Ray Funnell said Australia did not have to go to war in Iraq. "We did and it's a mess," Mr Funnell said.

Mr Howard also quoted Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd as saying it was an "empirical fact" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr Rudd in turn quoted David Jull, chairman of the Liberal-dominated committee of inquiry into intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, who said the Government had made the case that Iraq had such weapons and might pass them to terrorist organisations. But "this is not the picture that emerges from an examination of all the assessments provided to the committee".

Mr Rudd said Australia was not safer as a result of the Iraq war but was now more exposed as a terrorist target.

The 43 included two former defence force chiefs, two former navy chiefs, a former air force chief, six former heads of government departments and about 30 former heads of diplomatic missions abroad.